Understanding Google AdWords is now a critical must-have competency for business marketing–whatever business you may be in. I was actually talking about this with my dentist the other day. Whereas dentists used to just advertise in the phone-book and maybe in the local newspaper if they were particularly ambitious–since that was where most people found dentists, until maybe 7 or 8 years ago–now people are much more likely to find you by searching on their phone. So you need to know what kind of searches people are performing to find businesses like yours, and you need to capture that traffic. Two basic rules of thumb–things that you should check out in AdWords before investing in a certain keyword or constellation of keywords–how much traffic is flowing through the keyword you want to target and how competitive is it? You do the math–or hire an internet marketing firm to do the math for you.
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